The Wily Filipino

Your New Favorite Song.

Soundtrack for an Imaginary Wes Anderson Film, Track #2.

I don't think this actually fits: a short meticulous and Baroque-sounding composition, like the ones Mark Mothersbaugh writes, would be better, but Robert Pollard's "Dr. Fuji and Henry Charleston (Zoom Variation)" is such a sweet instrumental gem that I just had to include it in the mix.

Pollard's album Zoom, by the way, is four tracks of sheer pop perfection, almost as if these were outtakes from Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes. In my book it's already some of the best music I've heard all year (you'll read a longer review in December).

Hear it (192 kb, 2.43 mb).

Claire Denis' "The Intruder."

When the film festival programmer herself introduces the film as "frustrating" and "resists interpretation," well, consider yourself warned. And while I usually relish a fun mindbender of a film, there's little pleasure (at least right now) to be derived from this exercise, especially since one is teased -- constantly -- with the possibility that some form of coherence is just a few minutes away, just another plot twist around the corner. (The images are indeed beautiful -- the wintry French landscape, the colored ribbons at the christening of a Korean ship, the purple sky behind Tahitian coconut trees -- and so is the music, by Stuart Staples from the Tindersticks.)

We follow the travels of Michel Subor, the recipient of a seemingly illegal heart transplant, from France to Korea to Tahiti, where he is, ostensibly, looking for his son. Or something like that. He may be a retired secret agent. Or not. Throughout there are quick intimations of violence, as if the film is threatening to become a spy flick. (I think the nods to the thriller genre were what threw me off; had it been a film about, for instance, a grieving couple wandering the streets of Hiroshima, I would have been more receptive to the cinematic logic.)

But one by one, the little plot threads are dropped: the foreign passports, the heart in the snow, money from a Swiss bank, the Russian agent following him. It is as if what passes for narrative convention is slowly stripped off, layer by layer, until we are left with nothing but the ocean (perhaps as much a symbol of eternal longing here as it is in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou). (There is a semblance of circularity toward the end -- I can't spoil it -- but logically, at least in terms of physical logic, it makes little sense.)

Maybe some dreamwork tonight will help me figure it out, but for now... I am indeed frustrated, as the festival programmer rightly predicted. Especially frustrated, since there was a Puffy Amiyumi concert just next door.

America-Haters, Etc.

Thought I should make a direct link to the Homeland Security Racism report from the CFFSC here. In addition, there is a working paper by Dylan Rodriguez on the Bagong Diwa Prison Massacre -- more information on the Collective website.

I was going to write snarky comments like these:

I also wanted to draw my readers' attention to the comment left here and how it succinctly, if perhaps unwittingly, summarizes "imperialist" logic. The report linked above makes the argument, among others, that the American empire's military and mercantilist practices overseas are mirrored in its domestic surveillance methods -- at least, as manifested in the PATRIOT Act, control over subjects perceived as threats, particularly in the form of incarceration and deportation.

The blog comments -- which I'll reductively rephrase as "If you don't like it here, leave" -- exemplify the Bush administration's increasingly invidious attempts to stifle dissent and criticism. Unfortunately, sir, Filipinos are already being deported in worrying numbers, so your hopes about America-haters just might come true. Lucky you.

The majority of the people who signed the letter are American citizens, and so "going home" to the Philippines isn't literally correct -- but I, not an "America-hater," felt personally stung, since I am one of those people that is a "mere" immigrant to this country and could indeed, all practicalities aside (but there are many), return to the Philippines.

(This was the same kind of tactic the Marcos regime used to (arguably) effectively discredit its Filipino opposition -- both its conservative and radical left components -- overseas.)

I'll have to mull this over for a lengthier response.

Movie Quiz #3.

[Quiz done; answers already posted.]

Movie Quiz #2: The Answers.

Because of the unprecedented number of submissions for the last movie quiz (I'm being sarcastic), the next quiz will be way easier.

Here are the answers (they're all part of the Criterion Collection, by the way):

Shot 1:

In Mark Rosman's The House on Sorority Row -- just kidding. Vera Clouzot faints when she discovers that something that should be in the pool isn't, in Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 film Diabolique. Simone Signoret (standing off to one side) is probably more celebrated as the steely mistress, but Clouzot's performance as the nervous teacher is the better of the two. (I was only partly kidding about The House on Sorority Row: the slasher flick borrows this whole plot twist. Rosman would later go on to direct Hilary Duff in a couple of features.)

Shot 2:

The Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) wanders through a ballroom (in a riveting hour-long scene) in Luchino Visconti's magnificent The Leopard (1963). (I was initially hesitant to use this shot, figuring that it was too small to recognize Lancaster -- I was going to go with a vidcap of Lancaster and the gorgeous Claudia Cardinale dancing -- but people got it.)

Shot 3:

Serial killer and pedophile Peter Lorre is stuck, in Fritz Lang's 1931 film M. (There's the title, written on his back!)

Shot 4:

Nicolas Cage waves off the oncoming F-18s, in Michael Bay's The Rock (1996). It's big, dumb, loud, and a hell of a lot of fun. Almost everyone got this; maybe I should have used this pretty one instead.

Shot 5:

Homayon Ershadi drives around the outskirts of Teheran in his Range Rover, looking for someone to rescue him or bury him, in Abbas Kiarostami's 1988 film Taste of Cherry. Absolutely sublime (the hairs on my arm are standing up, just thinking about it).

Two people identified all five films correctly, but one person sent their answer in earlier (sorry Brandon). Congratulations to thick pigeon, who wrote, "Thank goodness for 3rd world piracy!" I suppose that means pirates have good taste, but poor Abbas...

A new quiz, with a musical twist, appears tomorrow.

Your New Favorite Song.

Bull Schanen (the winner of the previous movie quiz) never did respond, so I decided to go ahead and figure out a new theme for the mp3 uploads. Not sure if I can fill up a CD like before, but we'll see.

The next few uploads will be called "Soundtrack for an Imaginary Wes Anderson Film." His films, while perhaps thematically similar in general (and almost all of them have a fussy and almost distracting attention to detail, which isn't necessarily a bad thing), are also distinguished by an impeccable taste in music, which I won't dare to replicate here. But think, for instance, of the transcendent opening credits of The Royal Tenenbaums, with the muzaky version of "Hey Jude," or the ending of "Rushmore" with the Faces' "Ooh La La," or Sigur Ros' "Staralfur" in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (which I won't spoil); it marks Anderson as one of the young directors who meshes what are essentially mixtapes almost perfectly, and inextricably, with the rest of the film. (The other possible theme would have been "Soundtrack for an Imaginary Quentin Tarantino Film" -- maybe next time.)

Anyhow, the opening credits will be running over John Cale's "Paris 1919," from the fantastic 1973 album of the same name -- a track suitably classy-sounding and enigmatic and inaugural (can't think of the right word) and evocative, at the very least, of a kind of wistfulness. (If I were to pick a favorite Velvet, it would certainly be Cale, who had a greater command of melody and willingness to experiment than the more lionized Lou ever did -- with the exception, I suppose, of Metal Machine Music).

It's not clear what the song is about -- there's a ghost, and Beaujolais raining on the Champs Elysees, and "William William William Rogers." Somehow I envision quick cuts of different people tying bowties to this song; I'm not sure why.

Hear it (5.62 mb).

The Smiley Filipino.

There's a great, thought-provoking post from about a month back on Torn and Frayed that asks, Does the world look down on the Filipino? I'm not entirely sure, though, that the question is the right one to ask -- or rather, that the answers provided aren't exactly the right ones. (Granted, I can't answer his (?) question either.)

For instance:

Filipinos, on the other hand, are generally seen as hard-working, uncomplaining people, who stay out of trouble, lead hard lives, but manage to stay pleasant and cheerful through it all.

and:

The fact that so many countries are keen to employ Filipinos would seem to support the theory that Filipinos have a good international image compared with that of other immigrant populations.

Torn and Frayed already partly answers this in the entry. Such traits as industriousness, hospitality, cheerfulness, et cetera -- all those virtues long enumerated as being inherently Filipino by both Filipinos and their colonizers -- can also be read as easily exploitable, won't complain to or about their employers, will work for long hours for below minimum wage, come from a country where people live in garbage dumps (so being worked to the bone in, say, Singapore, won't look so bad in comparison) -- and still have big smiles on their faces! "Staying out of trouble," for instance, can be anything in a whole range of behaviors (from smoking weed to joining an anti-government protest). They're only easily trainable to the extent that the government has already thoroughly prepared them to be ready for foreign discipline, whatever that may entail.

Filipinos are routinely sent to countries where they are extremely vulnerable to exploitation, and this is all tacitly approved, and indeed enabled, by the Philippine government. In short, people may say, on an individual level, that they like hiring Filipinos because of such-and-such characteristics -- but it obscures the way states collude with one another to make Filipino labor more marketable as commodities in a globalized economy.

(I could go on about "inventing slights," but I'll stop there -- suffice it to say that the whole Art Bell hoax is quite interesting in and of itself.)

p.s. Metro's comment to the Torn and Frayed entry (scroll close to the bottom) -- "Yes the flips try to connect to asian culture, yes its ridiculous considering they are more mexican than anything" -- aren't as inane as they sound, but only if you're talking about Filipinos in the U.S., and only in the last century.

There are, after all, some fruitful parallels that can be made between them: their colonial experiences, the language, Catholicism, shared histories of sending migrant workers (and their exploitation), fairly similar issues of citizenship and transnational migration, recipes for adobo, and so on. (One can take Puerto Rico for an even closer colonial comparison -- colonized both by Spain and the United States, and still controlled by the latter in different degrees. What was it that folks say about Latinos and Filipinos again? Different mommies, but the same daddy?)

But on the whole, such assertions only really deal with about a hundred years of history or so, and only in a particular part of the world. Arguments about Filipinos being more similar to Latinos than to other Asians are fatuous at best, and are perhaps made by people who know little about Southeast Asia and its history.

Movie Quiz #2.

[Quiz is done; answers to be posted.]

Movie Quiz #1: The Answers.

Shot 1:


"Kiri kiri kiri kiri," Eihi Shiina coos as she plays with needles, in Takashi Miike's Audition (1999).

Shot 2:


See what happens when you disobey your teacher? From Kinji Fukusaku's Battle Royale (2000). Most everyone guessed the first two correctly, even if they hadn't seen it.

Shot 3:


This was the hardest one to identify. The scene occurs during the opening credits: the beautiful Meiko Kaji, bound up in prison, sharpening a spoon into a deadly weapon by scraping it against the cold stone floor, in Shunya Ito's Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972). The film in shot #5 borrows shamelessly from it (the theme song, for starters). Yeah, yeah, it's supposedly an homage, but still...

Shot 4:


C3PO and R2D2 -- sorry, two peasants named Tahei and Matakishi -- clamber up over a rocky hill only to find, to their chagrin, that Toshiro Mifune got there well before them, in Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (1958).

Shot 5:


Sonny Chiba figures out who Uma Thurman is using the Hattori Hanzo sword for, but dare not say his name, so he writes it instead, from Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill (2003).

Shot 6:


While it's her ass that occupies the opening credits, it's a bored Scarlet Johanssen's knee that we see here overlooking Tokyo, from Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003).

Shot 7:


A few seconds after seeing this image, the video will end, and the phone will ring, and you will die in seven days, from Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998).

Shot 8:


From the concluding nightclub shootout (one of many) in Seijun Suzuki's eye-popping, ultra-stylish gangster thriller Tokyo Drifter (1966). My friend Boyong thought it was something from the set of the Spandau Ballet video for "True."

Shot 9:


Two elderly parents, Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama, visit their children, but who are simply too busy to spend time with them. They are summarily shipped off to a resort, where they are kept awake by all the drunken carousing (and the heat), in Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953). If there's one movie you should see on this list, make it this one.

Congratulations to Bull Schanen from New Zealand, who guessed 8 out of 9. He wins -- okay, "wins" -- the privilege to name the theme for the next series of mp3 downloads. And lots of bragging rights, of course!

A new quiz begins tomorrow.